Library Events

Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle Film Festival

WHEN Tuesdays, Feb. 4, 11, 18, and 25

WHERE Library, Lower Level LG-14, 6:00 PM showing for all films

COST Free

In February, Brown Library will be hosting the Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle Film Festival in honor of Black History Month. These four films focus on the civil rights movement and the groups that were discriminated against. A discussion will be led after the showing of the film. There will be refreshments. These film showings will be Passport events.

The Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle Film Festival is made possible through a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part of its Bridging Cultures initiative, in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The Loving Story tells the dramatic story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s, and their landmark Supreme Court Case, Loving v. Virginia, that changed history. This film examines the drama, the history, and the current state of interracial marriage and tolerance in the United States.

This discussion will be led by Deborah Glenn from the College of Education.

FREEDOM RIDERS - Feb 11

Freedom Riders is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives - and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment - for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism.

This discussion will be led by Shannon Pohrte Wenzel from the Brown Library.

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME - Feb 18

Slavery by Another Name challenges one of our country's most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

This discussion will be led by Yvonne Isom from the Criminal and Social Justice Department.

THE ABOLITIONISTS - Feb 25

Bringing to life the intertwined stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimke, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown, The Abolitionists takes place during some of the most violent and contentious decades in American history, amid white-hot religious passions that set souls on fire, and bitter debates over the meaning of the Constitution and the nature of race. The documentary reveals how the movement shaped history by exposing the fatal flaw of a republic founded on liberty for some and bondage for others, setting the nation on a collision course.

This discussion will be led by Shannon Pohrte Wenzel from the Brown Library.